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It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

I like political parties that aren’t owned by foreign adversaries.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

Every reporter and pundit should have to declare if they ever vacationed with a billionaire.

Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

If you voted for Trump, you don’t get to speak about ethics, morals, or rule of law.

Welcome to day five of every-bit-as-bad-as-you-thought-it-would-be.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

My right to basic bodily autonomy is not on the table. that’s the new deal.

The real work of an opposition party is to oppose.

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

You are here: Home / Civil Rights / Racial Justice / This Week In Blackness / Literal Babies Are Shooting Babies

Literal Babies Are Shooting Babies

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Well this is a disturbing statistic: more and more toddlers are finding guns and shooting people with them. And these probably aren’t all the reported cases:

There have been at least 43 instances this year of somebody being shot by a toddler 3 or younger. In 31 of those 43 cases, a toddler found a gun and shot himself or herself. 13 inadvertently killed themselves. Roughly once a week this year, on average, a small child has found a gun, pointed it at himself or someone else, and pulled the trigger. Boys are disproportionately likely to do this: I could find only three cases where a girl under the age of 4 wounded someone with a gun. In 13 of the 43 total incidents, a child’s self-inflicted injuries were fatal.

Team Blackness also discussed a man detonating a bomb at a Walmart, an EMT who got in trouble for making an unscheduled stop to help a choking girl, and the husband of an Oklahoma mayor thought it was cool to dress up for Halloween as a KKK member.

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49Comments

  1. 1.

    Johnny Dollar

    and the husband of an Oklahoma mayor thought it was cool to dress up for Halloween as a KKK member.

    Let me guess: he forgot to buy a costume so had to wear something from his regular wardrobe.

  2. 2.

    Duane

    Smart guns would stop these senseless shootings and deaths.
    Gun nuts vehemently oppose them. They care about nothing but themselves.

  5. 5.

    RSA

    A few weeks ago I saw a blog post on some Gawker-related site with a title along the lines of “Gun safety for people who hate guns.” The author consulted a gun safety expert, who started in by explaining that when he and his two young girls handle guns… etc. I pitched in a comment about how nice it would be if there were strong social taboos against kids handling guns at all–maybe something along the lines of old PSAs on TV about blasting caps. I got half a dozen responses from people who disagreed. Maybe I wasn’t clear enough in my writing, but my impression was that whenever any article about guns comes online, even if it’s explicitly aimed at people against guns, the gun nuts descend on it.

  6. 6.

    Keith G

    Give the baby a Marksman award and a college scholarship from the NRA (and lifetime counseling) and I would call it a win/win.

  10. 10.

    rikyrah

    Marco Rubio’s Immigration Reversal Is Complete: He Promises To Deport Dreamers
    BY ESTHER YU-HSI LEE NOV 4, 2015 3:21PM

    long, long time ago, Republican presidential hopeful Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) got on the Senate floor and made a heartwarming speech about giving millions of undocumented immigrants the chance at a pathway to citizenship before casting a decisive vote on a comprehensive immigration reform bill that he helped craft. As many bills do in a contentious, bicameral Congress, the bill died. Wounded from defeat, Rubio retreated from his own bill, stating that he’s learned his lesson, sharply tipping his support instead towards improving border security measures and piecemeal legislation.

    Now as a Republican presidential contender in a field dominated by candidates supporting mass deportation and the end to birthright citizenship (currently a constitutional right granted to kids born on U.S. soil), Rubio wants it known that he will end the only protection that some undocumented immigrants have — the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which was created through executive action in 2012 by President Obama. The executive action has since granted temporary deportation relief and work authorization to as many as 680,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children.

    During a Young Professionals event in Manchester, New Hampshire, Rubio said that he would eventually end the DACA program, even if Congress didn’t act on a permanent legislative fix, according to at least two reporters, MSNBC’s Benjy Sarlin and The Guardian’s Sabrina Siddiqui.

    http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2015/11/04/3719376/marco-rubio-daca/

  13. 13.

    trollhattan

    @Duane:
    Yup, although I read that the guy who developed the most advanced model is going to give distribution in the States another…shot.

    “Smart” gun owners would be nice, too, but that’s clearly too much to ask for. Why isn’t gun accessibility considered de facto child endangerment? You don’t have to get into a wreck to be arrested and convicted for DUI.

  14. 14.

    trollhattan

    @RSA:
    We have friends whose daughter is the same age as ours. Dad loves shooting and is always at the range and convinced mom to go learn how to shoot. She didn’t want to but did to humor him. His reasoning: “That way you know what to do if somebody is trying to break in.”

    House has multiple exterior doors. The thing to do is grab the kids and run out one of them, not stay put and get into a shootout.

  15. 15.

    Mnemosyne (iPhone)

    This is my theory of the day: gun nuts think that guns are magical objects that confer good judgement and responsibility on anyone who holds one. That’s why they’re willing to hand a gun to their six-year-old but refuse to let that same six-year-old use a sharp knife to cut vegetables. After all, a knife is dangerous and the kid could hurt him/herself, unlike the perfectly safe gun.

    If someone doesn’t use or handle the gun in a safe way, well, that just shows that that person wasn’t found worthy by the gun and did not receive its magical powers.

  17. 17.

    trollhattan

    @Steeplejack:
    You should see my koi–not only do they have unblinking stares, they will come out of the water at you at dinnertime. Talk about scary.

  19. 19.

    piratedan7

    one guy with a shoe bomb and everyone in the western world has to take off their shoes in order to get on an airplane, a toddler with a gun shoots someone and everyone wonders if the toddler was justified in standing its ground……

  20. 20.

    Thoughtful David

    @MomSense:
    Here in Virginia filming at polling places isn’t illegal, but it is highly restricted. You first have to get permission from the polling place chief.
    I don’t know the origin of the restriction, but I’m guessing it goes back to the civil rights era and people doing to blacks voting exactly what was done in Maine. Its sure as he’ll intimidation.

  23. 23.

    dedc79

    @piratedan7: When people make the comparison between gun and car regulations, the gun nuts say “there’s no constitutional right to drive a car.” The shoe analogy works better, because it does implicate a constitutional right (the 4th amendment’s guarantee against unreasonable searches and seizures). Unfortunately that’s a constitutional right that the Supreme Court has been chipping away at for years, even as it’s drastically expanded the scope of the 2nd amendment.

  24. 24.

    Hungry Joe

    Here in San Diego a responsible gun owner has been shooting up a neighborhood and is in the fourth or fifth hour of a standoff with police. Since this Wild West show is taking place in the flight path to the airport, planes are being diverted.

    Sorry … sorry: He’s NOT a responsible gun owner. Or rather, he WAS a responsible gun owner until he started doing this Yosemite Sam thing. Now he’s an irresponsible gun owner.

  25. 25.

    Roger Moore

    @trollhattan:

    Why isn’t gun accessibility considered de facto child endangerment? You don’t have to get into a wreck to be arrested and convicted for DUI.

    The lobby for irresponsible gun use is much more powerful than the lobby for irresponsible car use.

  26. 26.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Mnemosyne (iPhone): I think it’s more that they divide the world into stark classes of Good Guys and Bad Guys (and maybe Dumb Guys), and if you’re not a Bad Guy or a Dumb Guy, you’re good to go. And they figure class membership is immutable and they can tell the difference, most of the time, at least.

    I was thinking… I like to play shooter games in which you shoot a lot of Bad Guys (usually, literal monsters) with your gun. In some of these games, it actually is possible to shoot Good Guys, by accident or by malice; in others, it isn’t.

    But in all of them, it’s literally impossible for you to injure or kill yourself with the gun. That’s one thing the game doesn’t let you do, no matter how much you wave the thing around and rapidly reload it and switch weapons, because allowing that wouldn’t be fun. Most of the time, the worst thing you can do with the gun is waste ammo.

    Some of these people, I think they might be thinking about weapons in a shooter-game kind of way. Most of the worst things that can happen aren’t even on the radar.

  27. 27.

    scav

    Given that the little girl left alone in the desert with a gun with orders to shoot the bad guys by her grandfather didn’t, in point of fact, shoot anyone, is she a good girl with a gun or not? Good Girl with a Gun would have taken someone out.

  28. 28.

    Brandon

    @Steeplejack: Guns don’t kill people, bad babies with guns do. The only way to deter bad babies with guns is for good babies with guns to open carry.

  30. 30.

    RSA

    @trollhattan:

    “That way you know what to do if somebody is trying to break in.”

    FFS. In contrast, I sometimes read martial arts experts who advise you to get out of dangerous situations, defusing them or running away. But per @Mnemosyne (iPhone), I guess that doesn’t apply with guns, which confer magical powers upon their wielders.

  31. 31.

    MomSense

    @Thoughtful David:

    I agree that it is meant to intimidate. It certainly makes one pause before deciding to say anything publicly about gun control.

    Oh we also decided to allow concealed carry without permits. Not a good idea.

  32. 32.

    MomSense

    @Mnemosyne (iPhone):

    Really off topic but I sent the BET video of Daveed, Lin and Renee with some members of the Roots to my son and he had already seen it. He may be an even bigger fan than we are.

  33. 33.

    Roger Moore

    @Brandon:

    Guns don’t kill people, bad babies with guns do.

    Sure guns kill people. Just read any article about some incompetent gunwaver whose has a negligent discharge. It doesn’t matter if the gun was dropped, mishandled, or deliberately pointed at somebody. The writing style is always the same: the gun went off by itself without the slightest human intervention.

  35. 35.

    Roger Moore

    @Goblue72:
    I know he’s riffing on the old “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” line. I’m pointing out how hypocritical the people who break out that line are, since they’re perfectly happy to turn around and blame the gun for its owner’s negligence.

  36. 36.

    Mnemosyne (iPhone)

    @MomSense:

    There’s a line-by-line deciphering of the lyrics on Genius.con, which is good, because I was clueless. (Though I’m guessing that’s the point of it being a cypher — you’re supposed to figure out all of the references and in-jokes afterwards.)

  38. 38.

    benw

    @Mnemosyne (iPhone): and Jesus nuts think that bibles are magical objects that confer good judgement and responsibility on anyone who reads one.

    And war nuts think that soldiers are magical objects that confer good judgement and responsibility on anyone who is one.

    And small-government nuts think that tax cuts are magical objects that confer good judgement and responsibility on anyone who proposes one.

    And anti-gay nuts think that hetero marriages are magical objects that confer good judgement and responsibility on anyone who is in one.

    And I like your theory, is what I’m saying.

  39. 39.

    WereBear

    I pied the fool. Welcome back, pie filter.

    I, too, love Mnemosyne’s theory. Mr WereBear and I have been watching, and discussing, All in the Family for the past few days. Archie Bunker is like a scale model of the conservative mind. They see people in aggregate clumps; all African-Americans, all women, all doctors… on and on. Differentiation is only towards a very few people most like themselves.

    It’s really frightening.

  40. 40.

    vhh

    @Duane: I suspect the way to decrease irresponsible gun use is to pass laws that clearly make gun owners financially liable for any damage their guns cause, just as people can be held liable for damage caused wby their cars, dogs, or children. Good gun owners are responsible, right? Lawyers, jury awards, and market forces will take things from there. It is noteworthy that even though George Zimmerman escaped criminal conviction for causing the death of Trayvon Martin, Martin’s family sued him in civil court for wrongful death. The suit was settled for a sum rumored to be ~$1M. As the awards for death and injury escalate, gun owners will be motivated to buy liability insurance. And then said insurance can be made mandatory in order to get a carry permit.

  41. 41.

    Some guy

    Breaking …. Bush still clinging to 4th place. Brinks Tricks full of UNLIMITED CORPORATE CSSH still stuck in traffic on Rt. 128 North.

    Developing …

  43. 43.

    Mike J

    @Some guy: The NRA spit the dummy when Seattle passed a five cent per round tax. It costs the city of Seattle millions every year to give medical treatment to the victims of the firearms industry. Time for them the people responsible to pick up some of the tab.

  47. 47.

    Matt McIrvin

    @efgoldman: I realized that my comment was technically wrong: in most of these games, you actually can kill yourself with a rocket launcher, by firing it in a too-confined space and catching yourself in the blast. So no Death Wish III.

  49. 49.

    Brandon

    @Roger Moore: If we are going to be pedants it’s actually not the guns that kill people, but the bullets. Take away the bullets and the only thing a gun is good for is pistol whipping someone. And I would be very surprised if a bad baby with a gun without bullets could pistol whip me. I’m not so confident about the future of my testes though, my daughter seems to have a special radar for those.

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